How educators can boost children’s interest in reading – Transcript

0:00 Maxine McKew
I’m Maxine McKew and this is Talking Teaching.

0:13 Penny Jones
One of the things I love to do is challenge a student, so I got one girl reading Pride and Prejudice in exchange of reading Twilight

0:22 Maxine McKew
Bravo. How did you do that?

0:23 Penny Jones
She wanted me to read Twilight and I just said to her, well I’m happy to take that challenge, but here’s one for you and let’s catch up and have a chat afterwards.

0:37 Maxine McKew
That’s Penny Jones from the Little School that Could - how Cobram Secondary in Regional Victoria got its act together on reading. We’ll hear from Penny shortly. Well good to have your company, and to teachers everywhere who’ve headed back to classrooms in the past few weeks, all the best for the year ahead. Now as you grapple with schedules, strategic plans, databanks and teaching and learning plans we hope you can take some time out to listen to our Talking Teaching podcasts. You’ll hear interviews on a whole range of issues relevant to your practice. Now what could be more relevant than how to teach our own stories... our nation’s literature, poetry and drama? Now sad to say, and this is true across the states and across sectors, when it comes to our students’ familiarity with the best of Australian writing, well it’s not a pretty picture, but Larissa McLean Davies is on a mission to change that. Larissa is one of my colleagues here at MGSE, and she’s developing programmes that are designed to boost the study of Australian literature with fresh resources specially designed for English teachers. Larissa is Associate Dean of Teaching and Learning, she did her PhD on the second wave of Australian women writers, and it goes without saying she’s a dedicated reader of Australian fiction. So Larissa, welcome

1:56 Larissa McLean Davies
Thank you Maxine.

2:03 Maxine McKew
It’s been ten years since the teaching of Australian texts in the Australian English curriculum, so I’m just wondering what is the state of play now in our schools? What’s being taught and what’s being left out?

2:10 Larissa McLean Davies
Ten years ago the Australian Curriculum, the first national curriculum for this country, took the somewhat radical move of... and it shouldn’t be radical but it was radical of mandating the teaching of Australian literature at every year level, and it’s interesting to note that it took until ten years ago for this to be the case, and in some states and territories of Australia this was always the case, but in other places teachers and curriculum authorities hadn’t been obliged necessarily to teach Australian literature. So for some teachers and for some places and contexts this has been quite a shift, particularly in the primary years and particularly the curriculum asks us to look at the works of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and also the texts of Asia, and look really broadly at what constitutes Australian literature. So where are we? We’ve been fortunate to be involved in various different research projects here at the University of Melbourne where we’ve been asking teachers how’s it going? How are you experiencing the teaching of Australian literature and what are you doing with your students? So one project we did in 2016 and 17 and supported by the Copyright Licensing Association, the cultural fund, and we were interviewing and also surveying teachers across the nation asking them what texts are you teaching? And of course these are the people who are interested and even committed to the teaching of Australian literature

3:35 Maxine McKew
Interested enough to respond to your survey

3:38 Larissa McLean Davies
Interested enough to respond to our survey. So we do have a list of sort of the top ten that came from those respondents to the survey over 200 across the country, and what is really interesting about our top ten is that we are teaching from Year 7 to 10 our texts that are not necessarily so contemporary. We are teaching from our favourite author, John Marsden, we’re teaching a text by Marlina Marchetta, Looking for Alibrandi, which I think Maxine was on the list when I started to become an English teacher

4:08 Maxine McKew
That goes back a few decades that one

4:10 Larissa McLean Davies
Well into the ... yes so from 1992. We do have some more contemporary ones. We have Anh Doh’s The Happiest Refugee, but we also have Phillip Gwynne’s Deadly Unna, which again is a text that’s been on the list for a very long time, and it represents Aboriginal people but of course Gwynne is not an indigenous author. So I think we can say there’s some texts being taken up, but we do see still a leaning towards texts that are perhaps not so contemporary, and particularly not really representing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders so well and not representing women so well.

4:42 Maxine McKew
Larissa, what’s happening at the Year 11 and 12 level? What if any Australian texts are being taught?

4:47 Larissa McLean Davies
Well we do have from a different project, a very broad national project called Investigating Literary Knowledge and the Making of English Teachers. So I’m fortunate to be leading that project with colleagues from a range of universities around the country, and what we see at Year 11 and 12 is in fact there’s a bit of a drop off in the teaching of Australian literature in the senior years. So our project there looks at the fact that in 7 and 8 we might have up to sort of 53% of texts that teachers are saying, look, we’re looking at a whole range of Australian texts there, but when we get to 11 and 12 we’re much more around the twenty to 25%

5:25 Maxine McKew
Sorry, 20%?

5:26 Larissa McLean Davies
20% of texts are Australian yes

5:29 Maxine McKew
That’s very low isn’t it?

5:29 Larissa McLean Davies
It is. You know sort of twenty and maybe getting up to 25, so it is low, and again we’re looking our top text, to give you a bit of an insight to research... hot off the press Maxine, is Jasper Jones, Craig Silvey’s, and a very... an excellent text, a wonderful text, but again when we look across this suite of texts we do see what we might expect... canonically we see male Australian writers, we see particular stories having a greater representation than perhaps the broad range of Australian stories that we think is really important to have for Australian students right across the nation.

6:03 Maxine McKew
So Larissa, what explains this deficit? Would you agree this is a problem because in fact we’re not exposing our young people to the great breadth of Australian writing and our national stories, so why are teachers not putting greater variety of material in front of young people?

6:20 Larissa McLean Davies
I think there’s a range of things that are in play, and I’ll just try and hit on a few of those. One is that we are in a very high stakes environment in most of our country around the teaching of English. There’s a long history of knowing certain kinds of texts – canonical British texts, canonical American texts, and we know that when the teaching of English formally started in Australia it was very closely connected to becoming English and having a close connection to an Imperial sort of mother country. And so some of those I guess biases, some of that culture remains in our English syllabus, and what we perceive and what our examination system perceives to be valuable literature to study still remains very closely linked with North American and with British kind of history. I’m not suggesting that we have not increased the teaching of Australian literature over time. Certainly in the 1940s when Australian literature was being formally studied in institutions, there was a great debate whether it should even be included. You know we had good examples...

7:20 Maxine McKew
Yes I think you’ve unearthed some extraordinary comments from the thirties and forties haven’t you from your research?

7:25 Larissa McLean Davies
Comments from a Professor of Literature at Adelaide University, Professor Stewart, giving his first lecture around and from the Commonwealth Literary Fund saying, in fact I can’t really talk about Australian literature because there isn’t any. So thanks very much for funding it.

7:42 Maxine McKew
And what date was that?

7:42 Larissa McLean Davies
Yeah 1940s for that

7:45 Maxine McKew
Extraordinary isn’t it?

7:45 Larissa McLean Davies
And of course we shouldn’t get away with just looking at Adelaide. Of course the University of Melbourne Professor Cowling had a long debate in The Age about you know he was really indicating that there was very little merit in studying Australian literature, it wasn’t indigenous like the gumtree, it was something that was located elsewhere. So we have that history

8:03 Maxine McKew
Well we do have that history. But if we leap over to the sixties and seventies when if you like there was a culture of Renaissance around the arts in Australia

8:11 Larissa McLean Davies
Yes

8:11 Maxine McKew
Did we not have a boost then?

8:14 Larissa McLean Davies
We certainly did, and in fact I think that boost is the reason I became interested as a student of Australian literature. So the Whitlam with the funding that was released to publishers and independent publishers and a whole range, you know McPhee Gribble, a range of particularly women’s publishers, that had a great impact on what was taught and read in schools

8:33 Maxine McKew
If we come to today, and it seems to me that you know we’ve never had a more lively local publishing scene, a lot of top line prizes for prizes, writers’ festivals across the country, although I would concede they tend to draw an older audience, but then we look at the situation in schools and it is, as you described, pretty lean

8:57 Larissa McLean Davies
Well I think there are ways in which we need to resource the teaching of Australian literature. There’s a lot of evidence to show that in fact we haven’t routinely taught Australian literature in schools, we do have a lot of our English teachers who may have had some limited exposure to the teaching of Australian literature. I mean all of the teachers who willingly give their time to our work and research, there’s an absolute desire to support the teaching of Australian literature. But sometimes our teachers register that they don’t feel necessarily confident to teach Australian literature or that they need better resources. You know there are many, many resources for the teaching of Shakespeare that have been built up over time, but resources around our own texts certainly may be more lean

9:37 Maxine McKew
I said at the beginning of this that you’re on a mission to actually do something about this, and so you’re working on a few partnerships at the moment. Can you give us a flavour of some of the practical things you’re working on that will help address this?

9:47 Larissa McLean Davies
Certainly I think we’ve done enough research now to know that there is an issue that we need to address, and the curriculum ten years ago has recognised that, but this resourcing is going to require people working together. And so we’re certainly looking at ways in which we might be able to empower teachers to become researchers of Australian literature is one of the key things we’re looking at; we’re looking at range of workshops; and we’re also looking at the ways in which we might be able to better articulate the value to students of studying a range of Australian literature because one of the things that missing in this Maxine is the student voice around what it is... what do you get when you’ve read a real range of Australian literature? How does it help you understand the country that you’re in, but then the place of that country in the world, and connect to other students and other people in your society? So we’re looking at partnerships with cultural institutions and a range of different places. Early days but we’re certainly well on the way with those conversations in that we might be able to both empower teachers to be researchers and advocates of Australian literature and also be able to share some of what it is and what it means for students to really have this rich experience of our literary work.

11:02 Maxine McKew
Many of our writers would have their archives with some of our big libraries and that, so you would think that there would have to be rich pickings there for I suppose teachers who can find a bit of time out if you like to do that research and develop some curriculum materials.

11:13 Larissa McLean Davies
We’re certainly looking at that Maxine and untapped resources that we have in archives right around Australia. Here at the University of Melbourne we have the Germaine Greer Archive for example

11:23 Maxine McKew
A wonderful archive

11:23 Larissa McLean Davies
A wonderful archive. Now you know to give teachers time, we know that teachers are incredibly busy and pressed with a whole lot of demands, and so to have projects, research projects that have an intensely practical outcome. So you know giving teachers the opportunity to become the experts in Australian literature, which I think is something that we haven’t been able to focus on enough

11:46 Maxine McKew
Larissa, what is the cost of not addressing this in a more comprehensive way? I mean would we have to worry about if you like young people coming into university courses, and I’m particularly thinking say of the next generation of English teachers.

12:00 Larissa McLean Davies
It is a really serious issue. One of the great joys that I have is working with pre-service teachers here at the University of Melbourne, people who are becoming English teachers, and one of the things we do very early on is we ask them to give us quotes of the texts that they’ve remembered from their own high school experience. And this is a very small sample size in a sense and it’s anecdotal, but the texts that they remember are very rarely Australian texts

12:24 Maxine McKew
Interesting isn’t it?

12:24 Larissa McLean Davies
And I guess what that means is, you locate your imaginative life outside of the places in which you live, and it’s not to say we know that literature can take you to far flung worlds and give you experiences, there’s a lot of research you know dating right back to the sixties and earlier about the value of reading literature that’s giving you experiences different to your lived experience, your real life experience. By the same token, if you don’t understand that stories can be told that are representing your experience and representing the experiences of the other students sitting next to you who might have a very different cultural or ethnic background to you, then you don’t understand that those stories and those people who are in the flesh next to you are valid and important to know about, and in fact they contribute to the very rich tapestry of what it is to be an Australian. And this is not a kind of nationalism gone mad or anything like that, but it is to say that we must know each other’s stories and we must look at the wide variety of stories, and we must see then how those stories ... a lot of literary studies now understands that any national stories are linked internationally, are linked globally, they’re bringing up stories from other places and other times. So seeing how our stories as Australians connect with the stories of people and places elsewhere is fundamental I think to our imaginative conception of what we can do in the world.

13:46 Maxine McKew
Are your students readers... broad readers?

13:49 Larissa McLean Davies Absolutely. We’re fortunate I think at the University of Melbourne that we have teachers coming into a graduate programme who have all got disciplinary background in literary studies. Now that is quite diverse absolutely. What constitutes literary studies at a university is very different all around the country and around the world, but nonetheless it is often the case and usually the case that our students become English teachers become they’ve loved reading or they’ve loved English at school. The challenge, Maxine, is the time then to maintain their reading life once they become teachers.

14:23 Maxine McKew
I ask because there is a wider debate as you know about the extent to which young Australians are appreciating the fact that the reading of literature is an enjoyable intellectual pursuit not just a chore. An interesting point I think that one of our stellar prizewinning authors, Charlotte Wood, has made recently, what worries her is that reader satisfaction is the sort of thing that is prize now, which she thinks is code for putting material in front of people that’s just there to make them feel comfortable, unchallenged and kind of good about themselves. That worries her because she in fact thinks it’s the opposite - those things that will challenge you that are really going to extend you. Do you have some sympathy of that point of view?

15:09 Larissa McLean Davies
I certainly do, and in fact I was fortunate to hear Charlotte deliver that address at ANU. So there’s a challenge here particularly in schools because we know that there’s a lot of research that says teenagers who are going to be successful readers need to be engaged by reading. But engagement doesn’t just necessarily mean a sort of facile or superficial enjoyment of a text and teachers know that, but there is a challenge there to make sure that engagement is rigorous and often it can be challenging and it can require you to think differently about yourself and your life. There’s been a debate, as you’ll be aware Maxine, around whether there should be trigger warnings for literature. Now to my mind, literature is always challenging and we don’t seem to have trigger warnings for history you know. History of the Revolutions is taught here.

15:57 Maxine McKew
I must say I’m not sympathetic to that viewpoint at all

15:59 Larissa McLean Davies No, but ...

16:01 Maxine McKew
It’s there

16:01 Larissa McLean Davies
But it is there and I think this is the nature of what it is to engage with art and literature is a form of art. It is confronting, it is challenging and its very purpose is to expand and extend the way you think and understand the world so that you can, as a person in the world, behave differently in ways that are going to be richer for the society that you’re part of. In fact we see this in the data for our teachers – what’s their major concern when they’re teaching Australian texts is the relevance to the student cohort. Now you can see that as a very positive thing, but you can also potentially see that as a way in which certain texts will not be shared because of what is perceived as you know lack of engagement or lack of relevance to this particular cohort. So you’ve got to very vigilant about that.

- music –

16:59 Maxine McKew
Well one of the things we have to do at Talking Teaching is to highlight some of our many success stories. Now it’s true that we have some decent sized challenges in Australian schooling, but it’s also true that there is tremendous energy and highly going efforts into lifting academic performance. So here’s a story from Penny Jones, who is lead teacher for Teaching and Learning at Cobram Secondary, a regional school on the Murray in the north-west of Victoria. Cobram has seen a big improvement in students’ reading capacity. Penny Jones welcome to Talking Teaching

17:31 Penny Jones
Thank you

17:32 Maxine McKew
Now Penny, you’re the lead teacher of Teaching and Learning at Cobram Secondary, now that’s way up on the Victorian border with New South Wales. Tell us a bit about your school

17:42 Penny Jones
So we’re quite a small school in quite an isolated environment. So currently we have approximately about 380 students and we’re about an hour away from our largest community which is Shepparton, and it provides a really lovely environment for us. So our teachers live in the community and therefore have a really close relationship with the students and family that we’re working with.

18:03 Maxine McKew
Now a while back you identified what you call a literacy drought among your students. Now what were the red flags that you were looking at that you thought we’ve really got to do something here?

18:14 Penny Jones
So we’re a school that’s used data over a number of years and we’ve been keeping a track on student performance, but in 2016 we saw quite a drop in our medium/high performance growth in our NAPLAN data for our Year 9 students. And probably more disturbingly, we saw a peak happen with our low growth students, so hitting about the 37% mark, and that happened simultaneously with the opportunity to join the Melbourne University Network of Schools and seemed to be a great chance to get in there and do something very proactive because you know reading is such the cornerstone of education

18:52 Maxine McKew
Were you seeing that drop right across the grade level, it wasn’t just with your Year 7, Year 8 students?

18:57 Penny Jones
It was particularly that relative growth at our Year 9 level, and we weren’t seeing the mid-standard performance using our patch reading data that we were wanting to see. We had a tradition of some underperformance in our reading, but what we were seeing is an escalation of that, and we felt that it was the perfect time to proactively trying nip it in the bud and change the story for these students.

19:21 Maxine McKew
So tell us about some of the practical things that you did... the strategy that you developed.

19:26 Penny Jones
So through our involvement with UMNOS we were really lucky to hook into the Shepparton or the Goulburn Valley network, and the drop in reading that we saw wasn’t unique to our school, it was actually something that was happening across the entire Goulburn Valley. So our network was quite unique because we did a cohesive approach to reading, and that allowed us over a three year period to access some amazing professional development through Melbourne University but particularly with Diana Snowball who came in and gave us the very specific strategies about the explicit teaching of reading comprehension within our classes, but also about the value of independent reading on a daily basis. So we combined both of those approaches, changed our entire structure of the school to allow that time of a morning, but also coupling that, with explicit instruction across all areas of our curriculum.

20:16 Maxine McKew
Di, I should say, is a very well known consultant who goes into a lot of schools, and she’s had decades of knowledge about improving literacy. What were some of the things she said to you and your teaching team, because this is for the whole school isn’t it, it’s not just one person tried to lead this? What were the things she said to you that you thought yeah, that’s how we have to apply this?

20:36 Penny Jones
So it was probably a series of stages that we needed to go through. So firstly, what seems surprisingly obvious now, but literally offering students the opportunity to read, but more importantly to read books that they wanted to read rather than what we dictated. So I think like in many secondary schools, we took a very traditional approach that students were given a set text at the year level and that’s what they read and that was the reading that was taking place, and we moved to the process of twenty minutes every morning that students could read whatever they liked, as long it was a book that was within our classroom library or that they’d brought from home. So that was our first stages, literally just getting students to read and find some joy in their reading again. We built from there through a series of many lessons that started off with instruction to teaching staff, teaching them and upskilling them on the variety of reading comprehension components, and for them then to take that into the classroom and initially teach it within our Illuminate Programme, our independent reading programme, but making sure that those lessons were being consolidated in the subject areas. So students learnt not only how to read fiction, but how to apply those same set of skills in a history classroom, a science classroom or a math classroom. So giving them subject-specific knowledge about how reading looks in particular areas.

21:56 Maxine McKew
Tell me more about that dedicated reading time. Is it about creating, if you like, the space to get kids away from screens, to slow them down, to get them to actually physically turn pages? What’s going on in that process?

22:09 Penny Jones
So I think our initial survey that we did with our reading across the school indicated that most of our students didn’t read on a daily basis

22:17 Maxine McKew
They didn’t like it? It wasn’t a preferred leisure activity or...?

22:20 Penny Jones
Yeah not identified. Not coming widely from families where books were located in the home. More than 50% of our homes - students reported had less than ten books within their home structure, and the research that Diane shared with us of the tremendous impact that that has on developing students’ reading patterns. So we needed to give students a space where they were allowed to read, possibly and encouraged and forced to read, and very quickly the feedback that we got from students is that it was such a lovely calming way for them to start the day, and maybe it took six to ten weeks for them to get into that pattern, and what we started to find is that when we try and stop their reading to do a mini lesson, we faced initially resistance because they were so engaged in the process of independent reading. For some it took a little bit longer. It’s the importance of knowing literature and being able to match students up appropriately with books, and for some students that can take quite a while until we can capture the appropriate genre that’s going to fire their imagination.

23:22 Maxine McKew
How do you move students who are not natural readers, who might be resistant to reading, how do you move them from say the easier text to something more challenging, something really emotionally engaging, something that stretches them intellectually?

23:55 Penny Jones
It is a very slow process, and the advice that we had from Diane was firstly allow them just to get some joy into reading, and what it requires is teachers of the Illuminate Programme really getting to know their students intimately, and to know them as people, which is great in a country school, I think it’s something we do really well, but also to know them as readers and slowly encourage them. Now we know for some readers they will stay set with a particular author or a genre, and although that’s not desirable in terms of developing vocabulary and skills, it’s getting the balance right because reading in itself is better than not reading and then slowly pushing them and guiding them. One of the things that I like to do is challenge a student. So I got one girl reading Pride and Prejudice in exchange of reading Twilight

24:23 Maxine McKew
Bravo. How did you do that?

24:26 Penny Jones
She wanted me to read Twilight and I just said to her, well I’m happy to take that challenge, but here’s one for you and let’s catch up and have a chat afterwards. And I was surprised, I enjoyed the book that I hadn’t read and didn’t expect and she enjoyed Pride and Prejudice. So I guess it’s just finding those little motivations and developing the relationships with students.

24:43 Maxine McKew
In fact you have a critical role, Penny, because you oversee the school’s library. Now how have you developed that and developed the richness of literature in that library?

24:52 Penny Jones
Look it’s been a challenge for us. Again we’re a small school and finances are tight so we’ve had to be very strategic. We’re also compounded that about the same time that we signed up with UMNOS, we were once a community library, so one of the last in Victoria where the community library was based as a part of the school library. So simultaneously we had this situation arise where we were wanting to get kids more engaged in reading, but we actually lost one of our main sources of literature within our community as it moved offsite. We were fortunate to be able to dedicate some money initially into our fiction collection and it’s knowing literature. I’m an avid reader. I also am fortunate to have teenage girls who are avid readers and just having a wide reading group. So it’s really lucky when you’re tapped into the teenage community.

25:41 Maxine McKew
So let’s come to what you’ve seen from the Illuminate Programme. You’ve been going for a couple of years. What is your student feedback from the programme?

25:49 Penny Jones
Look we try and gather student feedback on a fairly regular basis and largely it’s been positive. One of the things that students initially were saying was that there were active processes that were taking place when readers read, and they simply were aware of that and didn’t have the vocabulary to be able to articulate what was going on in their mind. We talk about reading as being creating a big blockbuster Hollywood movie, and if you’re consciously using those skills you are engaging with that huge movie sensory experience and that builds that love of reading for them.

26:22 Maxine McKew
Now yours has been quite a success story. You’ve really got some rods on the board. Tell us about that.

26:26 Penny Jones
Look we are astounded with the performance of our students and we’re so proud of both our students and staff to take this journey for this very small school. It’s been quite life-changing for them. So we were able to get our NAPLAN growth in this year and to see a tremendous improvement in our Year 9 growth. And what we saw significantly was a dramatic increase from our low growth into our mid-range, but also seeing that we had hit state average for our high growth. So we exceeded state average at middle growth and met state average. So for a very small, disadvantaged school that was a tremendous story of improvement

27:08 Maxine McKew
And that’s in what two... three years?

27:09 Penny Jones
That’s a three year period

27:11 Maxine McKew
That’s terrific

27:11 Penny Jones
Yeah look these were our trial groups, so they were our group that we rolled out initially and used to finesse the programme that we rolled across the whole school, and probably the greatest delight was having an assembly with that year level when their NAPLAN growth came in to be able to share with them the achievement that they had made and to see that they had actually exceeded state level. The pride in those students’ faces, it’s one of the most special teaching experiences I’ve had

27:38 Maxine McKew
I suppose that’s the other important thing and we shouldn’t lose sight of this – I would have thought that the students who can see that they’re moving from say average to optimal or low performing to mid performing must feel so much better about themselves

27:52 Penny Jones
And I think that’s probably our greatest challenge that we’ve needed to address because for many of our students, success has been not common in their teaching or their learning experiences. So one of the strategies was to make sure that we celebrated growth every time that they had their testing cycle. So we used patch reading every six months, and one of the things that we do is share and celebrate. So the students get their results, they own that information, and then ... and I know it sounds silly, but little certificates to show that they’ve hit optimal or that they’ve hit growth were tremendous for them because for some of those students, that’s the first time that they’ve ever achieved success and that they’ve been recognised publicly for that success... that’s life-changing in their decisions about tertiary education potentially.

28:38 Maxine McKew
So what now? You’ve achieved this amount of success, what’s ahead?

28:42 Penny Jones
So I think the biggest challenge that we have is to embed this programme as at Cobram Secondary College we are a college of readers, and to make sure that that becomes embedded in the culture for both students and for teachers. As a small country school, one of our challenges is keeping staff. So we do have a bit of a turnover of staff, and making sure that we’re adequately training and reinforcing that culture every year with our new staff coming through. Our other challenge is to make sure that we can get the right literature in the hands of students and that we’re able to continue to resource our library appropriately for that to happen. So our journey going forward is to make this our programme. It is our school, this is what happens when you choose Cobram Secondary, and making sure that our staff continue the fantastic work that they’ve been doing as maintaining their role as teachers of literacy whether the maths teacher or the English teacher.

29:33 Maxine McKew
Penny Jones thank you so much for that and I wish you all the best. And for any philanthropists out there who might be listening to this programme, if you want to donate some books to Cobram Secondary, I’m sure Penny would love to receive them.

29:45 Penny Jones
Oh we would love to hear from you, thank you very much Maxine.

29:48 Maxine McKew
Well that’s all for Talking Teaching this week. Throughout the year we’ll have more stories from our network schools and from elsewhere. Now thanks for your company. Talking Teaching is produced by the University of Melbourne from the Hallworth studios, our sound engineer is Gavin Neighbour. Bye for now.

- music -